virt-builder deploys an operating system plus any applications you specify.
I'm thinking even more barebones than that. More like, not even a full POSIX
userland, basically just libc and init and enough to get the IP stack started
and your application running.

virt-builder deploys an operating system plus any applications you specify. I'm thinking even more barebones than that. More like, not even a full POSIX userland, basically just libc and init and enough to get the IP stack started and your application running.

I use Fabric as it is a nice Python library that I can build up my own library of often used bits of code to be re-used later to do common tasks (other folks seem to share as well and even write specific libs for sysadmin work etc...)

If Python / Fabric is not your bag, there are many other language bindings to do the same sort of thing in language X. Let me know if you find a fun one :-)

Interesting thought, but I would think finding the "works for all software" solution to the existing solutions better than taking on yet another role for Citadel that is far outside the norm. I could very well be wrong though, as the coders for Citadel are quite clever :-)

I would be quite interested in anybody that finds something that fits the bill better than a full VM and setup via scripted ssh session.

Interesting thought, but I would think finding the "works for all software" solution to the existing solutions better than taking on yet another role for Citadel that is far outside the norm. I could very well be wrong though, as the coders for Citadel are quite clever :-)

I would be quite interested in anybody that finds something that fits the bill better than a full VM and setup via scripted ssh session.

well... with not having a plaintext config citadel is sort of an exception here already.

however, the biggest advantage of using debian above other distributions is the lots of work which was put into the debconf system - and not being able to utilize this makes that effort nonsense and better use fedora or whatever.

Here we then again have the troubles of not being able to run setup - one could think of having a sourceable shellscript into the initscript which then calls setup & starts citserver.

well... with not having a plaintext config citadel is sort of an exception here already.

however, the biggest advantage of using debian above other distributions is the lots of work which was put into the debconf system - and not being able to utilize this makes that effort nonsense and better use fedora or whatever.

Here we then again have the troubles of not being able to run setup - one could think of having a sourceable shellscript into the initscript which then calls setup & starts citserver.

But there are many packages that take tweaking post install on Debian using debconf. Most MTA setups that I can think of include the need to run another setup script (Exim, Postfix etc...). As I have never installed Citadel from the debs, I guess I don't know how you guys do that presently and should probably check it out before commenting further.